
It’s often difficult to pinpoint moments when new online services cross the chasm and become mainstream. Yesterday’s ‘Friday Night with Jonathan Ross’ was one such moment for Twitter.
The momentum behind Twitter has been building for a while now. Last April saw Downing St launch its own feed, which has now attracted almost 20,000 followers and key media including the BBC, Guardian and FT have used Twitter updates to not only disseminate news, but to drive all important traffic to their websites. Twitter is becoming a core online communication tool, with Boris Johnson for example, launching a Mayor of London Twitter feed last week and David Cameron answering questions posted on Twitter, during a live webcast discussing his green agenda.
However, arguably it’s been the power of celebrity endorsement which has propelled Twitter into the national consciousness. Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry have in the UK become the services most important advocates - even inspiring the Mail on Sunday of all papers, to devout half a page to a rather dismissive article about the service a few weekends back. You can watch them both discussing their love of Twitter on Ross’ show below - seen by at least 5.1 million viewers according to the BBC.
Ross and Fry have been joined by a growing international list of sports stars and pop stars, who in contrast to Facebook, have started using Twitter long before the majority of their fans. So will all this massive amount of free PR be enough to turn Twitter into the success story of recession-hit 2009?
Well, as ever the hype will need to meet the reality. The latest statistics from Hitwise show that Twitter was one of the fastest growing sites of 2008 with a 10-fold increase in traffic in the past 12-months. Given the amount of glitches which have afflicted and continue to afflict the service, it would be generous to say that this growth has taken the company ‘by surprise’. For me, Twitter really comes into its own during big events, such as Macworld, CES or Barack Obama’s inauguration and this is exactly when Twitter decides to crash under the weight of traffic. This isn’t acceptable or feasible going forward. While early adopters grudgingly accept that new online services may have teething troubles, the mainstream public will not be so patient or forgiving.
This year Twitter is firstly going to need to make a rapid and significant investment in its infrastructure, if it’s to cope with potentially millions of new users. Secondly, for an online service designed to connect people and share information it is beyond ridiculous that Twitter has also been unable to fix its search functionality. Twitter users need to be able to find each other and track what is being said about their favourite subjects. This investment will be ongoing and expensive which means that Twitter will finally have to bite the bullet and implement a revenue generating business model – whether ad-funded, subscription or a mixture of both.
For Twitter’s fanatical users it’s obviously exciting that everyone is finally taking about it, but to paraphrase David Ogilvy, all this great PR could just end up killing a bad product faster. In 2009 Twitter needs to get serious or risk crashing permanently under its own success.
Thanks to Techcrunch for the footage below